Among the bikers, hikers and runners on the path, North Salt Lake Mayor Kay Briggs is easy to spot. Tall, with a shock of white hair, he shouts hello to everyone he passes in a trademark voice that could easily pass for John Wayne's.

And he seemingly has a story for every rock and rut he sees.

"I hit that one riding my bike the other day," he says, pointing to a softball-sized rock. "It's one of those that stops you dead. Boy, I had to wonder for a minute if I was going to go over."

It's not the first rocky road Briggs has encountered crossing this hill - nor his last. The hill is the topic of a bitter spat between North Salt Lake, which wants to develop part of it, and its southern neighbor, Salt Lake City, which wants to preserve the land as open space.

Utahns got a good glimpse of the feisty Briggs at an open-space rally earlier this month in downtown Salt Lake City. Briggs all but stole the spotlight from Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson, who used the event to declare his intention to seek eminent domain over nearly 13 acres of the 80 acres North Salt City owns inside the capital city's boundaries. Briggs, with several North Salt Lake planning commissioners in tow for moral support, attempted to tell his side of the story at the rally. But he ended up standing in the middle of an unreceptive crowd, holding pictures of the trailhead he wants to build on the land and hollering to make his point.

Those who know Briggs were not surprised by his emotional outburst.

"One of the things we've always said about Kay, is that he's got that big booming voice," said Holladay resident Ken Coombs, a former neighbor of the Briggs family. "And yet, he is a such genuinely nice person. He's the kind of person that attracts a lot of attention when he walks into a room."

On Coombs' desk is a 1987 collection of Briggs' favorite jokes.

"It has jokes about everything - age and attitude, animals, careers, politics, sports," Coombs says. "Those are all things Kay cares about. I'm really not surprised he ran for mayor, and I'm not surprised he stands up for what he believes."

Briggs, who grew up in the factory town of Sugar City, Idaho, works hard at not letting a few "hells" or "damns" slip during his animated conversations. His resolve to excise minor expletives is vital in his work as a temporal affairs director for the LDS Church, selecting sites for chapels and conducting other church business.

"He's a firecracker, that's for sure," says Davis County Commissioner Dannie McConkie, who had lunch with Briggs the day of the rally. "But he's a good guy and a human, like the rest of us."

McConkie says Briggs was still debating whether to attend the rally when they parted ways. The next time he saw the mayor was in a newspaper photo that captured him wearing dark sunglasses and waving his arms in the air.

Briggs and other Davis County politicians have long felt stymied by Anderson, who once joined a lawsuit that stalled the Legacy Highway project. The mayors say Legacy Highway is needed as an alternate route through western Davis County to ease traffic gridlock. They nonetheless remained tight-lipped last winter when Anderson publicly chided his "neighbors to the north" about their driving habits. They resolved to keep going quietly about their business and to refrain from any name-calling, even going so far as to refer to their Salt Lake City counterpart as "Mr. Anderson" instead of by his iconic moniker, "Rocky." At the open-space rally, Briggs showed no such reticence.

[Briggs] "was probably expressing a lot of the frustrations of a lot of Davis County residents have felt over some of these things," McConkie says. "That all kind of bubbled up in public. I was disappointed because this is the kind of thing that should be discussed sitting around a table."

Anderson says he's already tried going that route and has found North Salt Lake to be an "unwilling partner." Salt Lake City has expressed interest in buying the land, but North Salt Lake officials insist the "fair-market" price should be determined by developers. Anderson says the land's commercial value is trumped by its historical significance as one of the last undeveloped pieces of the ancient Lake Bonneville shoreline.

However, he concedes Briggs makes a valid point when he criticizes development along the same ancient shoreline in the Salt Lake Valley.

"We are losing our urban open spaces," Anderson says. "For me, this whole issue symbolizes a difference in values, and I'm committed to doing what I can to save this remarkable place in its natural pristine state."

Briggs counters that he didn't seek out the homes cropping up on his city's side of the hill. He says North Salt Lake's plan to put a trailhead - paid for with funds generated from construction in the area - on the land is the best way to ensure more homes aren't built farther up the hill.

"Sure we could rezone the place," he says. "But what would I tell the landowners - that they can't do what their neighbors have done? There isn't a court of law that would hold up in. I don't want to do that to this little city."

lorib@sltrib.com